Media Center: 'Stalin's Curse' by Robert Gellately

WHO: Robert Gellately

WHAT: STALIN’S CURSE: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War

WHEN:
Published by Knopf March 8, 2013

WHERE: Set in the Soviet Union

WHY:
“Gellately’s fine contribution to Cold War studies will engage readers with its inside-the-Kremin detail.
“Author of several histories of German and Russian totalitarianism, Robert Gellately here indicts Stalin as the primary instigator of the Cold War, marshaling evidence from Communist archives that undermines the revisionist case for Western responsibility for starting the confrontation.
“Arguing that Stalin was a hands-on director of expanding the Communist domain from 1939 to 1953, Gellately points to Stalin’s ideological convictions as the driving motive in his political decisions, contrasting them with his mollifying arguments to Western diplomats about Russia’s reasonable needs for security. The ground-level ramifications were, as Gellately recounts, police-state suppression of freedom and abolition of capitalism through executions, deportations, and gulags, which claimed victims by the millions. Amid his inventory of countries subjected to Stalin’s rule, Gellately credits the red dictator with political acumen in deceiving Western leaders about his true objective of imposing one-party states. Stalin’s Communist associates and acolytes knew better, and the archives preserve their orders from Stalin about local tactics for eradicating non-Communist opposition and, in Korea, starting a war.
“Thoroughly researched, Gellately’s fine contribution to Cold War studies will engage readers with its inside-the-Kremlin detail.” —Gilbert Taylor, BOOKLIST

“Political and personal…interweaving scholarship and the testimonies of those who suffered under Stalin’s rule.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY